A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

particular village of the Kerensky district in Penza province, for example, peasant attacks on the local squires suddenly increased: it was connected to the return of several soldiers, who were then elected to the head of the village Soviet. The war had obviously had a brutalizing effect upon them, for they soon became notorious for their heavy bouts of drinking and sadistic violence. One poor noble widow, who had hitherto lived quite peacefully with the peasants, having already given to them most of her land and livestock, was driven to suicide when the drunken bullies shot her last

horse and cow and left her pet dog dead on her doorstep: it had been an act of pure spite.⁷⁶

* * * The Russians, it might seem, were particularly prone to such cruel and savage acts of revenge. 'I am', wrote Gorky, 'especially distrustful of a Russian when he gets power into his hands. Not long ago a slave, he becomes the most unbridled despot as soon as he has the chance to become his neighbour's master.'⁷⁷ Mob trials and lynchings were the most common expression of this popular vengeance, both in the countryside and in the towns. They had taken off as a mass phenomenon in response to the catastrophic rise in crime and the breakdown of law and order during 1917 (when Gorky claimed to have counted over 10,000 cases of mob justice). Since the police and the old criminal courts had virtually disappeared, there was a common feeling that the only way to deal with the problem of crime was by mob trials in the street. Some poor thief would be seized by the crowd, given summary justice and executed on the spot. Gorky witnessed one such instance in the centre of Petrograd, in which even children had taken part in the brutal execution of a thief (see pages 400—1). As the socioeconomic crisis deepened, and the popular belief developed that the burzhoois were responsible for it, so these mob trials began to assume an overtly class nature. They became a weapon in the war against privilege, focusing less on petty thieves from the urban poor and much more on merchants and shopkeepers, factory owners and employers, army officers, former tsarist officials and other figures of superordinate authority.

The Bolsheviks gave institutional form to the mob trials through the new People's Courts, where 'revolutionary justice' was summarily administered in all criminal cases. The old criminal justice system, with its formal rules of law, was abolished as a relic of the 'bourgeois order'. The twelve elected judges who made up the People's Courts did not have to have any formal legal training — they were to be guided by their 'revolutionary conscience' — and were mainly drawn from the workers, the peasants and the petty officials of the old law courts. Half of them had not been educated beyond primary level, and one in five belonged to the Bolshevik Party. The sessions of the People's Courts were little more than formalized mob trials. There were no set legal procedures or rules of evidence, which in any case hardly featured. Convictions were usually secured on the basis of denunciations, often arising from private vendettas, and sentences tailored to fit the mood of the crowd, which freely voiced its opinions from the public gallery.

The system of revolutionary justice administered by the People's Courts was similar in many ways to the old peasant customary law, with its rough and ready system of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Here is the Penal

Code introduced by the People's Court in the village of Lubny, in Tambov province, in May 1918:

If one strikes another fellow, the sufferer shall strike the offender ten times. If one strikes another fellow causing thereby a wound or a broken bone, the offender shall be deprived of life. If one commits theft or receives stolen articles he shall be deprived of life. If one commits arson and is caught, he shall be deprived of life.

It had long been a basic tenet of peasant legal consciousness that a rich man stealing from the poor was many times more guilty than a poor one stealing from the rich — and this same principle of 'class justice' was applied in the People's Courts. Judgements were reached according to the social status of the accused and their victims. In one People's Court the jurors made it a practice to inspect the hands of the defendant and, if they were clean and soft, to find him guilty. Speculative traders were heavily punished and sometimes even sentenced to death, whereas robbers — and sometimes even murderers — of the rich were often given only a very light sentence, or even acquitted altogether, if they pleaded poverty as the cause of their crime.⁷⁸ The looting of the looters had been legalized and, in the process, law as such abolished: there was only lawlessness.

Lenin had always been insistent that the legal system should be used as a weapon of mass terror against the bourgeoisie. The system of mob law which evolved through the Peoples Courts gave him that weapon of terror. So too did the Revolutionary Tribunals, modelled on their Jacobin namesakes, which dealt with a whole new range of 'crimes against the state'. In February 1918, at the time of the German invasion of Russia, Lenin issued a decree — 'The Socialist Fatherland in Danger!' — ordering the Revolutionary Tribunals to shoot 'on the spot' all 'enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans and counter-revolutionary agitators'.⁷⁹ To his disappointment, the Revolutionary Tribunals turned out to be highly inefficient instruments of the Bolshevik Terror: too many of its judges could be easily bribed, which is hardly surprising given the fact that most of them came directly from the factory floor. But this was only the start of a new state machinery of mass terror, and the work of the tribunals was gradually taken over by the local Chekas, which were not wanting in revolutionary zeal. Latsis, one of the Cheka's leaders, instructed his officials:

not to look for evidence as proof that the accused has acted or spoken against the Soviets. First you must ask him to what class he belongs, what his social origin is, his education and profession. These are the questions

that must determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning of the Red Terror.⁸⁰

During its early stages of development the Cheka system was extremely decentralized: each local Cheka organization was a law unto itself. This made the Cheka Terror both random and susceptible to pressures from below. Virtually anyone could be arrested, and almost anything could be construed as 'counterrevolutionary' behaviour. The Cheka's own instructions listed private trading, drunkenness, and even being late for work as 'counter-revolutionary' conduct. But on this basis the whole of the population would have been in jail. Many of the early victims of the Red Terror had been arrested on the basis of no more than a single denunciation by some personal enemy. The Cheka in Omsk complained in April that of the 1,000 cases of 'counter-revolution' so far brought before it, more than 200 had had to be thrown out because the only evidence against the accused had been the hearsay of some person or group of people who, it later turned out, had a private grudge. Some of the less scrupulous Chekas did not let this stop them from securing a conviction. The Penza Department of Justice complained in April, for example, that its prisons were 'full of innocent people arrested by the Cheka on the basis of some false accusation by one person against another'. It was particularly common for someone in debt to denounce his creditor as a 'kulak usurer', and thus a 'counterrevolutionary'.⁸¹ It was one way to cancel your debts.

This is what was happening, then, in the early stages of the Terror, before the Centre took control and redirected it against its own politically defined enemies: sections of society were driving the Terror from below as a means of retribution against those whom they perceived as their own enemies, which in their eyes meant the same thing as 'the enemies of the revolution'. Their ability to do this was of course dependent upon their place in the local Bolshevik power structure. But this hardly means that the Terror was constructed from above. Rather it suggests that there was a close but complicated link between the political and the mass terror. As Dzerzhinsky himself wrote in 1922, all the Cheka did was to 'give a wise direction' to the 'centuries-old hatred of the proletariat for its oppressors', a hatred which might otherwise 'express itself in senseless and bloody episodes'.⁸²

Many people foresaw that this mass terror would result in a social holocaust in which not only the bourgeoisie but also many of the common people would be destroyed. Citing the words of the Anarchist sailor Zhelezniakov, that 'for the welfare of the Russian people even a million people could be killed', Gorky warned the readers of Novaia zhizn' on 17 January: